Communicating messages by telephone has increased tremendously in the past decade. Communicating information such as advertisements and public announcements has become very important. Leaving pre-recorded messages has become a popular technique for communicating information by telemarketers to thousands of individuals and businesses. Telemarketers generally attempt to deliver pre-recorded information messages by telephone to live consumers and to answering machines. However, telemarketers have many problems associated with leaving pre-recorded messages. For example, many pre-recorded messages are not taken seriously because the recipients usually know that the message was pre-recorded. Furthermore, the pre-recorded messages are not correctly received by the answering machines. For example, the machine may turn on after a pre-recorded message has begun playing. Thus, it has become more popular than ever for the telemarketers to use computers which will detect conditions that an answering machine is receiving the call so that the call can be dropped (hung up). See for example: U.S. Pat. No. 4,356,348 to Smith. These dropped calls can be quite significant when considering the number of answering machines and undelivered information messages that occur.
Attempts have been made over the years to overcome the problems with delivering messages to telephone answering machines. See for example U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,667,065 to Bangerter; 4,941,168 to Kelly. Jr.; 5,371,787 to Hamilton; 5,430,792 to Jesurum et al.; and 5,581,602 to Szlam et al. However, these patents are generally limited to sensing audio signals generated by the answering machines for the purpose of determining that the call has connected to a machine, (as opposed to a call that connects to a live person) and do not address the problem of when to begin playback of an outgoing recorded message to insure that it is recorded in its' entirety by the answering device. Many existing devices designed to deliver a prerecorded message to an answering device commence playing a recorded message based on mistakenly detecting when the “beep” has occurred. Recognizing a “commence recording now beep” signal is a common problem for both automated systems and real callers trying to leave messages on answering machines. Furthermore, these patents do not fully analyze the connected calls in order to utilize preselected delay times to deliver and play recorded messages.
Message delivery systems which deliver a recorded message to an answering machine must solve the problem of determining when to “Launch” (begin playback of) the prerecorded message. Conventional systems rely on a timer to determine the moment to begin playback of the recorded message. Typically the timer is initiated once the determination has been made that the call has been answered by a machine. Message delivery systems which rely on timed delivery experience a high percentage of truncation of the recorded message being delivered. This is a result of the system beginning playback of the recorded message BEFORE the answering machine starts recording.
Another serious problem with timer based systems is that many answering machines will “hang up” on the system before the message launches. This is due to a “vox” function in many answering machines which allows them to stop recording after they detect several seconds of continuous silence. If a timer based system waits too long before launching the message, the called answering machine may have already hung up before the message playback begins.
Additional problems also exist with sending pre-recorded messages. Often the persons being called will not listen to the recorded message since the message is generic and artificial sounding in nature. For example, pre-recorded messages generally do not personally address the individuals being called. Thus, the person receiving the generic message knows it was a pre-recorded message and either hangs up or ignores the substance of the message being delivered. Thus, sending the pre-recorded message can often be wasted. Ignoring important messages is not good when the message may be dealing with imminent dangerous weather conditions and other imminent dangers, and the like.
Other patents of interest include, U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,404,400 to Hamilton; 5,444,767 to Goetcheus et al.; 5,652,784 to Blen et al.; and 5,787,151 to Nakatsu et al. However, none of these patents solve all of the above problems.